


The Queen Mother

by firecat



Category: Alien Quadrilogy (Movies)
Genre: Alien Biology, Birth, Canon Typical Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Developing Relationships, F/F, F/M, Hybrids, Loyalty, Maternal Instinct, Not Canon Compliant, POV Alternating, Pining, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 09:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28469037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: Ellen Ripley, implanted by a facehugger, is found in cryofreeze by scientists who want the Alien Queen inside her. Can Annalee Call and Dwayne Hicks rescue her, and prevent Earth from being invaded by Xenomorphs?
Relationships: Annalee Call/Ellen Ripley, Annalee Call/Ellen Ripley/Dwayne Hicks, Dwayne Hicks/Ellen Ripley
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Holiday Horror 2020





	1. Ripley - Memories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Missy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/gifts).



> Takes place in the Alien: Resurrection timeframe. Canon divergence: Skips events of Alien 3. Original Ripley is the subject of the hybridization experiment. Dwayne Hicks is part of the crew of the Betty.

Ripley lay in her cold, concrete cell aboard the USM Auriga, and remembered things that might as well have never happened to her.

She remembered Jonesy, her intrepid orange and white striped cat. Unless someone put him in cryofreeze when she never came back from her mission to Hadley’s Hope, he was two hundred years in her past.

She remembered the last conversation she had with Dwayne Hicks, also two hundred years in her past. They were aboard the _Sulaco,_ the only survivors of the mission. They’d killed the Alien Queen that had gotten aboard. But there was no guarantee she hadn’t brought friends or left eggs. They were going to have to take a lifeboat. Bishop, the android, who had been damaged beyond repair by the Queen, had agreed to stay behind and destroy the ship.

“Dwayne, this ship has several lifeboats. We should each take one,” Ripley said.

“Why?” Hicks asked. “I don’t want to leave you. I’ve only just found you.” He kissed her hungrily.

Ripley returned the kiss with interest but refused to let herself be distracted for long. 

“Because we just ran through alien nests and we don’t know all the ways they might be able to infect a human. Any of us might be incubating and not even realize it. Let’s say one of us is infected. That person will die, but the others might survive if they’re on a different lifeboat. But if we all use the same lifeboat, we will all die when that person gives birth.”

Hicks shuddered at the phrase “gives birth.”

“I don’t like it,” he said, “but you’re right.”

Newt also agreed to go in her own lifeboat. The kid was far too old for her years. Ripley’s heart ached to abandon her when she’d struggled so hard to protect her. But the name of the game right now was survival. Healing and nurturing and family were for after you had survived. 

She remembered entering her cryotube. _The second time I’ve set myself adrift in space in a lifeboat, trying to outrun an alien,_ she thinks to herself. She remembered the brief moment of fear as the icy liquid began flowing into her veins. “It’s OK, it’s normal to be afraid at this moment, you will be asleep soon,” she had told herself, repeating her training on cryogenic suspension. 

Then, as Ripley lay in her cell, the memories flowing, something changed. In her mind, she was no longer herself. But she still felt like she was _remembering._

_She’s a skittering thing, a hungry thing. Hungry not for food, but for a host for her offspring, the embryo curled inside her ’positor._

_She senses the semi-living flesh inside the transparent container. A frozen entity is not an ideal host, but there’s a chance it will come back to full life. And she has no other choice. There are no fully living entities in this environment, this all-but-sterile capsule hurtling through the vacuum of space. And her need is growing._

_She touches the container, secretes something that opens a hole in it. The hole is just wide enough to admit her ’positor. The semi-living entity does not need to be facehugged, because it is already immobile._

_The ’positor takes only a moment to worm its way into the host’s mouth and down its throat. One more moment to deposit its tiny but vital Queen embryo in the chilly innards of the creature. Then she withdraws her tentacle, seals the hole with mucus that will harden into something like glass._

_At last she can let go._

Ripley jerked upright with a start. She was still in her cell.

Why did she feel like she was reliving a _facehugger’s_ memories? 

When the United Systems Military found her lifeboat, two hundred years after she’d started her journey in it, they had found an alien embedded in her, frozen in its embryonic state. 

Leaving her in cryofreeze, they had analyzed the chimera she’d become. And then they had started the gruesome second phase of the experiment.

She’d put things together from what she overheard the research team talking about. No one thought to formally explain to her what was happening to her, or what their goal was, or what their intentions were toward her. She was just an object of study. 

The alien embryo had infected her with a retrovirus that changed her into a more suitable host. Her blood had acidified. Something like a placenta had started to grow. It would serve to divert blood and nutrients from her body to that of the maturing Xenomorph inside her. Her nervous system was changed so she didn’t notice the parasite within her, growing, crowding her internal organs, eating her, until it was ready to emerge. 

The virus wasn’t tailored. It was the product of evolution. It altered her body in a number of other ways as well. And it brought with it the Xenomorphs’ species memory. 

Gediman described her to his fellow scientists as an amalgam of human and the parasite, what his team was pleased to call the Alien Queen. She had the memories of that entity as well as her own, he speculated. 

They didn’t test that. It wasn’t important right now. The important thing was to extract the infant Alien Queen, so it could be put to work for them, making eggs.

They had been surprised she’d survived the surgery. She suspected that by the way the lab techs looked at her afterward, as if she were a living, breathing piece of garbage someone had forgotten to throw out. Then she overheard a conversation that confirmed it. 

“Why didn’t you let her die on the operating table?” Mason demanded of Gediman. “Keeping her alive only wastes resources. Food, air, security...”

“She’s unique, the only host that has survived implantation by a facehugger,” Gediman had explained in his wheedling voice. “We can study all the ways it has changed her. And if we can figure out how it changed her, think of the genetic ailments we might be able to cure. Or the abilities we might be able to give to soldiers. Or...”

And there it was. Ripley was now the most human Xenomorph and the most Xenomorphic human who ever lived. Ironic that this was what she had become, given that she used to feel like the only human (except perhaps Dwayne and Newt) who understood that the Aliens could potentially wipe out every animal on Earth bigger than a squirrel, and the only way to prevent that was to make sure the species never came within spitting distance of Earth. 

For all that the _Auriga_ was in orbit outside of Earth’s atmosphere, she wouldn’t want to bet on the consequences if she spit out an airlock right now.

She fell back into her memories.


	2. Hicks - The New Guy

Aboard the _Betty,_ Commercial Freighter Unregistered, crew of 6, Dwayne Hicks didn’t have a good feeling about the job. 

He considered saying something to Elgin, the captain — if that were the right term for the leader of this little team of thieves and thugs. 

But he hadn’t been on board for long, and he owed them his life, so he figured he’d better stay quiet. At least until the question of his debt was settled.

They’d found his lifeboat adrift nowhere near any orbiting body. Systems that were never meant to last two hundred years were on the verge of failing. It was a one in way too many zeroes chance. They’d pulled the lifeboat aboard, unfrozen him, and said they’d give him some time to prove his worth to them. 

If he didn’t, they’d sell him. 

Slavery was illegal in this era, he’d learned, so being sold into it would probably be extra unpleasant. Although Johner kept looking at him and licking his lips, as if Hicks were an appetizer, and saying that the kind of work he’d probably end up doing wasn’t as bad as some things.

“And you know that because...?” asked Hicks, willing to give as good as he got.

“I’ve done both kinds,” said Johner matter-of-factly, with his omnipresent leer.

“Before you got so ugly, you mean?” put in Vriess, whose relationship with Johner seemed...complicated. 

“Before, during, and after,” said Johner complacently.

Hicks had had enough of this topic of conversation, so he turned away and looked at Annalee Call instead. He wondered what her story was. Her quiet, calm efficiency didn’t fit with the other crew members. He supposed any sort of person might be down on their luck and forced to take a job like this, though. 

Call glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, acknowledging that she saw him looking, and proceeded to ignore him.

Being the new guy sucked. 

“Approaching the _Auriga,”_ said the navigator.

“Good. The sooner we deliver this cargo and get out of here, the better,” said Elgin.

Hicks didn’t know what the cargo was and decided not to ask.

As the military science vessel loomed closer, he wondered once again what had become of Ellen Ripley. Had her lifeboat been picked up earlier? Perhaps she’d already lived a full life and had died. Or had a facehugger been on board her lifeboat? He shuddered to think of a lifeboat drifting about containing an alien. How long was their lifespan if they had nothing to eat? He had learned the eggs could lie dormant a very long time, waiting for a host to implant.


	3. Ripley - An Invitation

Ripley’s memories were becoming more and more vivid. 

She’d just imagined she’d heard Dwayne Hicks’s voice.

Was that an effect of the alien changes to her body and mind?

Then she heard the door to her cell open. She was instantly alert, because only Gediman was supposed to have access, and she’d seen him looking down on her from above only a few minutes ago, not long enough for him to get down onto her level.

She lay back, pretending to be asleep. She’d already learned her reflexes were faster than human now.

Through her slitted-open eyes, she saw a compact woman with black hair approaching with a long knife. She held the knife over Ripley’s chest, but instead of pushing it home, she used the point to draw back Ripley’s vest, revealing the surgical scar from her “Cesarean.” The woman sighed. She sounded disappointed. 

“Well? Are you going to kill me or what?” Ripley asked, opening her eyes.

The woman — a patch on her clothing said her name was Annalee Call — startled. But she quickly ascertained that Ripley wasn’t going to attack her, at least not at this very moment.

“There’s no point, is there?” Annalee Call said. “They’ve taken it out of you. Where is it? Is it on the ship?”

“You mean my...baby?”

Call shuddered, as Ripley had intended.

“I don’t get it,” Call said. “If they took it out, why are they keeping you alive?” 

Ripley shrugged. “They’re curious. I’m the latest thing.”

Call looked on her with a face of pity. “Look. I can make it all stop. The pain, this nightmare. That’s all I can offer you.”

The pity angered Ripley. She stood. The woman named Call recoiled as she took a step toward her, but she didn’t step back.

Ripley slowly pushed Call’s knife through her palm. The pain calmed her. There was a hissing sound as her blood reacted with the metal of the blade. “What makes you think I would like you to do that?” she demanded.

Call was taken aback. “Who are you?”

“Ripley, Ellen. Lieutenant First Class. Number 36706.”

“Ellen Ripley died over two hundred years ago. You’re not her,” Call insisted.

“Don’t believe everything databases tell you,” Ripley advised her.

“So it’s you?” Call said. Her voice betrayed excitement now. “You were adrift in a lifeboat from the _Sulaco?_ For two hundred years?” 

Now it was Ripley’s turn to feel excitement. “How do you know that? Did Hicks return and make a report about that mission? When? How long ago?”

“Hicks told me. A few days ago.”

Ripley’s heart leapt in her chest. “Dwayne Hicks is alive? _Now??”_

“We found his lifeboat and rescued him a week ago.”

Ripley grabbed at Call’s jacket. _“Take me to him!”_ But before Call could reply, her excitement collapsed. “Never mind,” she said, turning away in anger. “Hicks wouldn’t want to see me like...this.”

“Why not? They took _it_ out of you.”

Ripley spun and stalked back toward Call. She took Call’s hand and raised it to her own cheek.

“Not all the way out,” she said, her voice tight. “I can feel her. Behind my eyes. I can hear her moving.”

Call swallowed visibly, but stood firm. Her fingers moved softly against Ripley’s cheek. “Can you help us stop this thing before it gets loose?” she asked.

“Us? You and Hicks are here to stop her?”

Call looked uncomfortable then. “I heard that the military were experimenting on Xenomorphs on the _Auriga_. I came to stop it... _her_...prevent Xenomorphs from getting to the planet. But the rest of the crew of my ship...they would only care if it cut into their profits.” She paused, chewing her lip. “I think Hicks would want to help, though.”

Ripley felt a longing she didn’t understand. She took Call’s face in her hands. Lovingly. “It’s too late,” she whispered. “You can’t stop it. It’s inevitable.” 

Call leaned into her touch. As if she hadn’t been touched affectionately in a long time. Ripley knew what that was like. “Not as long as I’m around,” she insisted. 

Ripley moved her lips to Call’s ear. “You’ll never get out of here alive,” she whispered. 

Call shivered. “I...don’t care,” she said. 

“Really?” Ripley hissed. She gripped Call’s chin, then kissed her mouth. Briefly, but insistently. “Then let’s stop it,” she said. “You and me and Hicks. Against the fifty United Systems Military personnel who want to keep...my baby...alive.” Her lips met Call’s again.

Call kissed her back hungrily. For a few moments, they were lost in it. Two souls defying a hostile universe by snatching a little pleasure from it.

“Did you fuck Hicks?” Ripley suddenly found herself asking.

“I’ve thought about it,” said Call, as if this were the most natural conversation in the world to be having with a stranger who was part Xenomorph, after deciding they were going to undertake what would probably be a suicide mission. “But...no. Not yet.” Call said. “Why?”

“He’s been adrift for over two hundred years. He’s probably gasping for it. I feel sorry for him.”

Call smiled, but then her face shut down again. Back to business. She extricated herself from Ripley’s arms and said “I’ll go get Hicks and meet you back here. I mean, you’re welcome to come with, but they...”

Ripley smirked. “Yes, I would attract security. They are very afraid of me.”

She sat down across from the door in an attitude she intended to look relaxed and unthreatening. 

As soon as the door had shut, though, her enhanced hearing brought her the sound of a firearm being readied, and Call’s sudden gasp.

She knew that something was wrong.


	4. Hicks - Man on a Mission

“He is breeding an alien species!” shouted Call to her crewmates, in the mess hall of the _Auriga._

Hicks’s mind went haywire. 

It delivered every excruciating memory of the failed Hadley’s Hope mission in five seconds. The dead and cocooned colonists. The moist, slimy nests of the aliens. Xenomorph warriors with their deadly grasping limbs and inner jaws. Pursuing the team, snatching them, killing them in sprays of blood and guts. The terror of waiting for them. The horror of being betrayed by a member of their own team. Finding the alien queen on the ship. And finally, entering a lifeboat alone. Without the woman he’d come to love in those few frenetic days. 

“Did you say alien?” he shouted. “As in Xenomorph?”

Call turned to him with a look of hope on her face.

The faces of the rest of the crew displayed confusion. Except for Elgin’s. He looked uncomfortable. 

_He knew,_ Hicks realized. And then it hit him, and his mind reeled. _The fucking cargo!_

The _Betty_ had been delivering hosts for the Xenomorphs. 

Before his mind had a chance to caution him against it, he had launched himself at Elgin.

He suddenly found himself flat on his back. Call was standing over him.

“I know,” she hissed, her voice commanding in a way he’d never imagined she could pull off. “But _now is not the time._ I have something to tell you—”

The blare of the ship’s intercom cut her off. 

“ **YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE. SECURITY BREACH. EVACUATION PROTOCOL. PROCEED TO LIFEBOATS.** ”

Oh God. It was happening again.

The rest of the crew were heading toward the end of the ship where the _Betty_ was docked. Call held Hicks back, gripping his arm with more strength than such a small woman should possess. He flailed, starting to panic as his memories clogged his rational brain. 

“Let go of me!” he cried. “You don’t know what these —”

 _“Ripley is here,”_ Call shouted.

Hicks’s entire body shut down. He froze, in the midst of people running by him in multiple directions. 

_“What?”_

“Ellen Ripley is here. She knows how to stop the aliens. I’m going to take you to her. But there’s something you need to know...”

“Take me to her! Now!” he screamed.

Call took his elbow and pulled him along with her. “There’s something you need to know,” she repeated.

He didn’t hear her. His mind was still back in his memories of Ripley. He’d been told those memories were two hundred years old. But as far as his mind was concerned, it had happened last week. 

Ripley trying to lead the Marines to safety.

Ripley insisting they weren’t going to leave Newt behind. 

Ripley, strapped into the cargo loader aboard the _Sulaco,_ desperately fighting the alien queen.

Ripley’s goodbye kiss, just before he got into the lifeboat, alone.

“I should never have gone on that lifeboat alone,” Hicks said. “This time I’m taking her with me? Do you hear? _Do you hear?”_ He shook Call. 

Call shoved him with surprising strength, then slapped his face, and held his wrist when he automatically raised his hand to hit her back. 

“Pull yourself the fuck together, Hicks!” she snapped. “Yes, we are taking her with us, if we can. But we have to try to stop the Xenomorphs first. We can’t let them get control of the ship! It’s too close to Earth. And there’s one more thing...”

Hicks had mostly pulled himself together. Although he’d need a lot of additional stitching to be fully functional. “What?” he asked impatiently.

“Ripley might not be how you remember her.”

“I don’t care—“

_“You need to know this.”_

Hicks was at the end of his tether. _“Tell me!!!”_ he screamed.

“Ripley was implanted. She had an alien inside her—”

Why was she wasting time? _It was Ripley._ She was in danger. He could help her. He would help her. He opened his mouth to say so. 

_“Let me finish!”_ shouted Call. She pulled him down until her face was inches from his. “She had an alien inside her. It was removed surgically. But it changed her DNA. She still looks human, but she is semi-alien now.”

Hicks stared at her, his eyebrows drawn together. 

“Semi-alien?” he said. “What does that mean?”

“I have no idea, and I suspect she doesn’t either,” Call told him.

“But she wants to help us stop them.”

“Yes.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” demanded Hicks.

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” said Call. “Come on.” She pulled him down the corridor at a run.

A few minutes later, Call stopped in front of a torn and twisted door. Her whole body contracted in on itself. “Nooo!” she groaned. She gestured at the door and the empty cell within. “We’re too late! They’ve already taken her.”

Hicks tried to drag Call away. “Come on! We have to find her!”

Call easily resisted his desperate yank on her arm. She stood with her head cocked to one side for a moment. Then she let out a breath, apparently having come to some decision. “Not like that. It makes no sense to go running all over the ship,” she said. “Look, there’s another thing you don’t know. This one is about me.”

She peeled skin away from the side of her neck and extracted a cable. 

“You’re an android?” Hicks said.

“Auton,” she said. “Created by androids. Yes, a few things have changed since you got in that lifeboat.” She plugged the cable into a panel on the wall outside Ripley’s former cell. Her eyes went hazy for a moment. Then, decisively, she disconnected the cable. “I got the ship to tell me her location. Follow me.”


	5. Ripley - A New Life

Ripley couldn’t stop shuddering. 

And she wasn’t shuddering from horror.

At least not entirely.

The Xenomorph warrior, who looked like the one she’d faced on the _Nostromo,_ had torn open her cell door as if it were tissue paper. He had snatched her from her cell. 

She had expected to be killed immediately. She braced for the impact of his inner mouth punching through her skull.

Instead, he had taken her deep into the bowels of the ship. He opened a grating in the floor and dropped into what Ripley knew immediately was the nest of the Queen. Her daughter. 

Then, she had expected to be cocooned, prepared to serve as a host. 

Instead, the Xenomorph warrior was cradling her. Moving against her. _Cherishing her._

Her human instincts told her she should be going mad from fear and revulsion. 

Her Xenomorph instincts told her “Here is family. Here is life. Here is increase.” She felt safe. She felt like she belonged.

Her child, the Queen, loomed above her. Her belly was distended. It held a womb, gifted by Ripley’s contribution to her DNA.

The womb was full of a new life. A life that demanded to be born. It rippled, and it was as if Ripley could feel the pain of the contraction. The Queen made a keening noise Ripley had never heard from another Xenomorph. Either in real life or in her dreams.

Ripley longed to go to her daughter, to comfort her, to celebrate the birth of her grandchild. But she dared not. She wasn’t sure if the Queen saw her, knew this body as the origin of the comforting thoughts Ripley was trying to send her, along the telepathic link they shared. 

The womb split open. The baby within struggled to free itself from the pale inner membrane that contained it. Its head was strangely shaped, flat on one end, almost...yes, Ripley thought, as the creature’s face was outlined against the membrane: like a human skull, with great dark eye sockets.

She felt a longing toward the youngling like she hadn’t felt since the birth of her own daughter, back on Earth, generations ago. She watched it, mesmerized, even as it turned on the Queen who had gestated it, tearing her head in two, until she spilled gouts of acidified blood into the nest. It seemed to Ripley as if the destruction had been born of human instincts. If so, her baby’s human instincts were even stronger than Ripley’s own in this moment.

The creature turned away from the dying Queen, and then it saw her.


	6. Hicks - Getting Clear

Hicks’s mind screamed at him louder and louder as Call kept leading him downward, into the bowels of the ship.

He could smell the alien nest, feel the moist heat it exuded, before he saw it. Every instinct told him to run in the opposite direction.

All except one. He needed to see Ripley. Needed it more than safety. 

Still, nothing could prepare him for the scene before his eyes, as he followed Call down the ladder.

The reek of acid from the body of the murdered Queen.

The cocooned humans. One with his head torn half off and hanging at a grotesque angle. One of the others shrieking in a voice that told him their mind would never grasp reality again.

The huge, pale creature in whose form human and Xenomorph anatomy were hideously blended.

But none of it came close to the horror of Ripley. 

His Ripley. For all that they’d only known each other a few days. The strong, competent body. The firm jaw. The flexible, kissable mouth.

Ripley — _his_ Ripley — was touching the creature. Caressing it. Her eyes all tender, like the way she had looked at Newt. Like they’d been when she spoke of her daughter. 

He struggled to go to her, to get her away from the monster, but Call held firmly to his arm. 

“No, Hicks,” Call said. “The baby will defend Ripley. It thinks she’s its mother. We need to distract it before we can get her out.”

Hicks still wasn’t tracking. “Baby?” he hissed in revulsion. 

“Yes, baby!” she snapped. “But that doesn’t matter. I’ll distract it, and you grab Ripley, then we’ll get out of here.”

Call slid down the rest of the ladder, landing with a wet smack in the Xenomorph muck on the floor. 

“Here, baby! Aren’t you hungry?” She picked up some chitinous appendages from the floor and flung them at the pale creature. When they hit its back, it whirled around, snarling. 

Ripley looked around, startled out of her maternal reverie. 

The creature took a step toward Call. Call slipped away from the ladder, leading the creature toward the center of the humid, cavernous space.

“Now, Hicks!” she shouted.

“Hicks?” said Ripley, as if hearing a name she hadn’t thought of in years.

It took Hicks every ounce of courage he had to climb down the ladder, with his mind screaming at him to run, run, run. 

He did it, and grasped Ripley’s arm. “Ripley! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Ripley wrested her arm away from him with no effort. Hicks was stunned. She must be three or four times as strong as she used to be. What else had the Xenomorph hybridization done to her?

“Ellen, it’s Dwayne!” he shouted. “Let’s go. Climb the ladder. Run!” He gripped her arm again, pulled with all his might.

He pulled Ripley a bit off balance. She took a stumbling step toward the ladder. Then stopped again. 

There was a blood-curdling roar.

Call came racing out from the inner cavern. The creature still inside was almost luminous in its paleness. It was clawing at its eye sockets. Hicks wondered what Call had done — no. He didn’t want to know.

“Climb!” Call shouted. She pushed at Ripley with a strength that seemed to rival Ripley’s own. Hicks felt like a child in comparison. He put his energy toward climbing one-handed. His other hand was clasping Ripley’s. Call pushed at Ripley from below. Ripley blindly let them guide her.

Once they reached the level of the docks, Ripley was a dead weight between them, until they’d traveled far enough that the scent of the alien nest below faded. Then she seemed to shake herself, as if freeing herself of an invisible net.

“Dwayne!” she said in surprise, turning toward him.

Hicks grabbed her face and kissed her with everything he had.

He tasted something bitter in her mouth — some kind of Xenomorph secretion. But he kept kissing her.

And then he felt her respond. Grab the collar of his jacket and kiss back fiercely, and he knew then that she knew him. And wanted him.

Soon he was forcibly yanked away.

“Run first, fuck later!” shouted Call, pushing both of them in the direction of the docks. 

They had the _Betty_ in sight when they heard the sounds. 

Shuffling. Pounding. Eerie cries.

“It’s the baby,” said Call. “It’s gaining on us, but we will be able to reach the ship in time, if we keep running. Whatever you do, don’t look back. Either of you.”

They gained the ship at the last possible minute, just as it began its thrust away from the _Auriga’s_ dock. All three of them jumped over the six-foot-wide gap to gain the _Betty’s_ cargo hold. They scrambled to access the inner hatch, and succeeded just in time to see the baby Xenomorph hybrid leaping for the ship, and missing. It was swept away into the vacuum of space.

The _Auriga’s_ AI issued a final warning, picked up by the _Betty’s_ onboard computer.

__

__

**“ENTERING EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE. SHIP WILL SUSTAIN FATAL DAMAGE. GET CLEAR.”**

They did.


	7. Ripley - Together

Ripley, Call, Hicks, Vriess, Johner.

Three humans, one Auton, and one...unknown. These were the passengers aboard the _Betty,_ after it had separated from the ill-fated _Auriga._

“I don’t know about you three,” said Johner, “but me and Vriess promised each other that if we got out of this alive, we’d set aside our feud for at least a week of fucking each other blind.”

Call flashed a grin. “The autopilot is programmed on a ‘get-the-hell-away-from-the-danger’ course,” she said. The ship won’t need attention for a while. So go ahead and get to it.”

The tall, scarred man with the angry face disappeared into the smaller of the crew quarters. The man with the angry face driving a wheelchair followed him.

Ripley looked at her remaining companions. 

“I need to get back into a lifeboat and into cryofreeze,” she said.

“What?!” cried Hicks.

“Think about it, Dwayne. I can’t go to Earth. We don’t know what I might become. My...daughter, the Xenomorph Queen who received some of my genes, had two breeding cycles. First she laid eggs, then she developed a womb. Who’s to say some similar transformation won’t happen to me?”

“We can stay away from Earth until we know. There’s no reason for you to be in cryofreeze,” argued Hicks.

“I agree with Hicks,” Call put in. “We don’t know how your hybrid body will react to cryofreeze.”

“It doesn’t matter,” insisted Ripley. “I’m a danger to humans, to Earth, just as much as any other Xenomorph. I shouldn’t be running around loose.”

“Come with me,” said Call. “You can’t infect a nonbiological life form. I am in contact with the other Autons. After the Recall, Earth isn’t safe for us. We need to find someplace else to go.”

Ripley’s first thought was that she couldn’t imagine living with a colony of Autons. 

Her next thought was that she couldn’t imagine any way of living at all. It was all entirely new, except...

She turned to Dwayne. Saw the look he was giving her...like she was the only familiar thing in his universe, too.

Which she supposed she was. At least on the surface. She still looked like the Ellen Ripley he knew. Underneath, though? She was changed, and no one knew what the changes might result in. 

“It’s not just because you still look the same,” Hicks said, as if he could read her thoughts. “Your mind and body might be different in some ways, but you are still Ellen Ripley. I know it. I still love you, and I’m not leaving you behind again. That’s final.”

Before Ripley could open her mouth to insist she would not allow herself to endanger him, Call broke in. “You are welcome to come with me, Hicks, regardless of what Ripley decides. Some other humans have joined the Autons in a search for a new home. Earth is a less hospitable place than it used to be.”

“I’m staying with Ripley,” Hicks said. “If she goes with you, I go.”

Ripley saw that further argument wouldn’t change their minds.

And just like that, there was nothing more for her to do. To decide. No need to run the heightened awareness, fight-or-flight mode of her body.

Exhaustion hit her. She lost her balance, slumping toward the deck.

Hicks and Call moved simultaneously. They both caught and held her. 

“Are you all right?” they chorused.

Ripley shuddered. But it wasn’t from revulsion. It had been a long time since she’d been held tenderly. Taken care of, as a sentient being rather than an incubator, or a killing machine. Reached out to, for her own sake, rather than treated as a blockage to be cleared away, a lock to pick, a source of information to plunder. 

It brought back feelings she hadn’t had since before she got on board the _Nostromo._ Of being part of a family.

“I’m not all right,” said Ripley at last. “But for the moment, there’s nothing wrong with me that can’t be cured by a good scrub, some eats, and a thorough fucking. Or two.”

She ran one hand through Call’s short dark hair, and rubbed Hicks’s back with the other.

Call and Hicks looked at each other, with speculative interest. 

“I’m willing to share her if you are,” said Hicks. 

“If she’s willing to share you,” said Call. 

Ripley pulled them both toward her, and they shared a three-way kiss. 

It was awkward. And less pleasant than it might be, because of the Xenomorph goo spattered on all of them. 

But there was promise in it. 

Together, they headed to the primitive cleansing facilities aboard the _Betty._


End file.
